Moving walkways are born as an evolution of escalators, so that it is possible to use wheeled devices, such as shopping carts, trolleys, pushchairs or vehicles for handicapped people, whose transport cannot be carried out in an escalator. This type of moving walkways, usually known as “moving ramps”, have in the lower head a transition between the passable moving surface and the lower fixed area, which consist of grooved combs of the fixed plates which are intertwined with grooves of the pallets which form the passable moving surface, facilitating the entrance and exit of the user and thus preventing in this way his/her trapping.
Conventional passenger conveyor systems, such as escalators or moving walkways, in their traditional conception, place the combs in parallel with the passable moving surface which leads to two classic solutions for the lower head of the ramps.
The first one consists of placing both the lower combs, fixed part, and the loading moving surface horizontally. This implies the need of a curved transition of this loading moving surface or belt of pallets from their horizontal part to the inclined one, which turns out into a greater total length of the moving walkway. This leads to a smaller harnessing of the place of installation.
In the second solution, both the lower combs and the pallets are placed in an inclined arrangement. In this way, the lower head is not lengthened as in the previous solution, but there are problems in the transportation of people with trolleys both at the entrance through the lower head, upwardly, and at the exit, downwardly. In this way, in upward direction, the user must exert a force to overcome the weight of the trolley which hinders his/her entrance. In downward direction, the transition of the trolleys from the moving belt to the inclined fixed plates causes the release of the trolley brake systems; so the user has to hold the trolley to prevent it from leaving the moving walkway uncontrollably.